Is "Survivors become Killers after losing all hope" just a head canon?

Trapper_Licker

There are two early online mentions of the "Survivors become Killers after losing all hope" theory I could find, the most popular probably being the often quoted "the LORE behind the MIST" by Steam user Shovel Fighter.

The lore post is a popular one and one of the earliest lore summaries we have (15 Jun, 2016). It gives us a lengthy exposition about all sorts of lore and then a direct copy of the journal entries of Benedict Baker found in the old manual on the offical page.

The way the upper part of the text is formulated and structured however strongly suggests that it isn't coming from an official source like the copied journal entries from below. There are several grammatical issues, use of colloquial language and quite some statements and formulations that are not really going well with the lore that was established in the game itself.

Shovel Fighter writes:
"Once thing is certain though. With each passing death a little of the survivors soul is lost. Eventually as all hope evaporates, the survivor becomes less and less useful to the Entity, slowly devolving into a cold and emotionless shell. These lost survivors, whose hope has long since left them eventually become what they once feared so much, becoming the very killers that hunted them."

It is however not the earliest mentioning of the "Survivors become Killers after losing all hope" lore bit:
The Gamepedia entry for the Entity was edited by user Reestv the day before the Steam forum post was made and an almost identical text was added [for some reason the link redirects to the current version of the entry. However you can still access it under the "History" rider on the top right corner for 23:07, 14 June 2016‎ Reestv]:

"With each passing death a little of the survivors soul is lost. Eventually as all hope evaporates, the survivor becomes less and less useful to the Entity, slowly devolving into a cold and emotionless shell. These lost survivors, whose hope has long since left them eventually become what they once feared so much, the very killers that hunted them."

We can rule out the Steam post as a reliable source and as origin of the theory now, leaving us with the question of where Reestv got this lore from.

I couldn't find it in the manual or elsewhere on the official homepage, nor any hint of it in the game itself. All of the killers we currently know of have been picked up by the Entity as killers, and all the survivors currently playable have stayed survivors and not shown any signs of turning into killers.

While I haven't watched all the dev streams, I have watched a lot of them, and neither of the ones I've seen nor the ones we have summaries of are confirming or supporting this theory.

So, my question here is: Where is this lore coming from? (This can and should be asked for a lot of lore written in the official wiki by the way.) If Reestv stays the only source, it would prove it to be nothing but one person's head canon and should be regarded as such.

MegaWaffle

Nea and Dwight.

Its not just "head cannon".

TheBretzel

Strange, I know I mostly got this game for the Lore and horror gameplay and I swear I remember reading this particular thing in either the old manual or the wiki. Never heard about the steam thread until two months ago.

Also I should add that the lore from the manual has been changed, not much but still. I know they added more detail about Benedict's whereabouts before entering the Entity's realm. For example now you can sort of speculate what his job is. Maybe it was written there and they removed it ? I don't know just guessing at this point.

Vortexas

Honestly makes me wonder if any of the current killers were once survivors.

My pick would probably be Nurse, if anything.

scoobydoomh

I think it's possible it could have been canon, but the devs can't seem to make up their minds about what the lore is. Like mentioned before, they make changes to it so it is entirely possible that at one point it was cannon but then they removed it.

akbays35

Nea and the pussycats